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0:00
Hello. My name is Mike Clayton,
and I'm the founder
of Online PM Courses,
which is a platform
for project managers
to learn project management.
In this talk, we'll
be looking at
managing a project
process with Kanban.
0:18
Kanban started out as part of
Toyota's just-in-time
lean production system.
It wasn't a project
management approach at all.
It was used in factories,
and the word "kanban"
refers to the cards
that visibly represented
the flow of work
through parts of the
manufacturing process.
Now, project managers use
Kanban to track project work.
It's risen in popularity
over recent years
with the rise of Agile
project management,
and it's one of the more
popular Agile approaches.
It's often combined
with, perhaps,
the most popular approach
to Agile project management,
Scrum, to form Scrumban.
Kanban is most appropriate
for the kinds of projects
and organisations
that run lots of small
projects in parallel,
and in particular
projects that go through
the same stages again and again.
1:15
If Kanban was designed
for the manufacturing
production environment,
the obvious question is,
what has this to do with
project management?
Why does Kanban work
in this environment?
Because, if you think about it,
it's exactly the opposite of
an operational
production environment.
Production
environments are about
doing the same thing
again and again,
whilst projects are about doing
different things every time.
Well, if you think about
how manufacturing works,
and I don't come from a
manufacturing background
so this is a huge
simplification,
raw materials go into a pipeline
and a series of
processes take place
to process those raw materials
so that a finished product
comes out at the end.
Now let's look at a project.
Requirements go into a pipeline
and a series of processes
take place to create things,
and finished deliverables
come out at the end.
What Kanban does is make
the position of each
of our project requirements
in the pipeline
very clear and visible
to everyone working
on the project.
If some are getting stuck
or there is a bottleneck
where lots of
activities are stuck
at the same stage
of the process,
then the project manager
can easily spot it
and address the problems.
They can deploy resources,
or they can hold
certain activities back
to allow others to proceed
according to priorities.
